What else in my lifetime has changed? Most obviously, the technological advances we’ve made. In my youth, we had tiny black and white tv sets in front of which the family hovered to watch grainy transmissions of shows like Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, and Steve Allen on the original Tonight Show. And look what we have today: huge screens in crystal clarity and hundreds, no, thousands, of shows and movies from which we can choose. Then, we had dial phones hanging on a wall near the kitchen, with three-digit phone numbers, often shared with several neighbors on a “party line.” Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t possibly have seen where his invention was going, with tiny computer-phones now in almost every pocket, with nearly everyone spending hours and hours texting or speaking to friends and relatives. How far we’ve come. Or have we really regressed? We see technological advances that boggle the mind: automobiles with stick shifts to luxurious computerized autos that can drive themselves; typewriters to word-processors; hard copy books to e-books; black and white photography to colorful digitized selfies; computers with storage capacities of 48 megabytes to these things we now have that can store almost the entire Library of Congress or more movies than we’d be able to watch in a lifetime; music once stored on cylinders and played back on gramophones, then tapes and vinyl grooved disks played at speeds of 78, then 45, then 33⅓ rpm’s and up to what we have today with MP3 recordings stored on compact disks; surgical procedures that transfer the scalpel from the surgeon to a computerized arm. Social changes? In the old old days, most people didn’t bother to lock their homes day or night or lock their cars or remove their car keys when they parked. Most people married for life. Now most couples either don’t get married at all or get divorced once or twice or more often. Then there were laws prohibiting mixed marriages. Now, such unions are common, with offspring that hasten the “Browning of America.” Now we have a much greater understanding of sexual orientation, with same-sex marriages now legally accepted. With Facebook and Twitter and other social networks, relationships are now more pervasive although not necessarily stronger. Government keeps getting bigger and bigger with ever more steps toward the Big Brother George Orwell warned us about, with cameras everywhere keeping track of our every move, with hackers on the internet invading our privacy and scamming us out of billions, with governmental agencies listening to and recording our phone calls. The only ones with tattoos back then were sailors with a modest heart or anchor on an upper arm. Now, ink is everywhere on body parts the old sailors would have been embarrassed to consider. Then most of us weren’t overweight, but now obesity is rampant. Our lifespans now are much longer than back then. We now drink more and take more drugs (both prescriptive and illegal) than ever before, but cigarettes are passé and electronic smoking devices are in. Marijuana was then illegal and is now legal in many states and soon will probably be nationwide. We’re seeing the near end of newspapers, magazines, and books in favor of those same things now available digitally. With Wikipedia and computer search engines, we now have at our fingertips the entire body of man’s knowledge. We now own more guns than ever before. We now view the world as a dangerous place. We now are more aware of and fearful of what terrorists can do to us. Have we progressed or regressed? It all depends on whether you’re a glass half-full or a glass half-empty guy. I’m happy to say that I’m a glass half-full. I’ve seen more changes in my lifetime, both good and bad, than I could possibly have imagined back when I was a young, innocent, ignorant boy in the bombed-out hills of South Korea.
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